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Tutorials

How Smart Slider 3 Works on Cloudways Platform

Saud Razzak
Saud Razzak
September 5, 2019

Smart Slider 3 is a content presentation plugin that can be used to present various types of content to your website’s visitors. It is not only a great plugin but also helps create an example of how such content plugins should be made.

Smart Slider 3 is an innovative content tool that helps create YouTube, Vimeo, and WordPress post sliders. It brings with it an easy-to-use slide editor with different layers. Smart Slider 3 is free but there is also a premium version that is available to download as well.

This is a guest post written by Saud Razzak, who is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. If you would like to write a guest post contact us.

In this tutorial, I’ll be checking out how Smart Slider 3 works on WordPress websites, while using Cloudways, a managed cloud hosting platform.

But why Cloudways?

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that comes equipped with top-notch cloud infrastructures, i.e., DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, GCE, and AWS servers, along with 60+ global data centers. One of the main reasons I chose Cloudways is that every server on Cloudways comes pre-configured with Linux, PHP – FPM, NGINX, Varnish, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB.
Cloudways offers a free trial to use its integrated services with no hassles.

cloudways

In addition, Cloudways also supports hosting for PHP-based web applications. In total, Cloudways provides more than 10 apps installation options, including WordPress. Testing Smart Slider 3 on such a platform would be interesting, so I went for it. Here’s how the test went.

Signing Up With Cloudways

First thing’s first, I signed up for a free trial with Cloudways. The process was really fast and easy.

Signing Up With Cloudways

After verifying my details, I logged into the account and clicked on the Now verify your email address and then logged into my account. I then clicked on the Launch button.

Sign Up With Cloudways

Selecting my Application

I selected WordPress as my application. However, you have the option to use the latest version of WordPress, WordPress Multisite, WordPress with WooCommerce, or clean WordPress (without any optimization).

Application And Server Details In Cloudways

Selecting my desired Infrastructure

Here, I had five different cloud infrastructures to choose from. For this test, I am selected DigitalOcean as my server.

Selecting desired Infrastructure

Select Your Server Size

After selecting my infrastructure, I also had the option to scale my server size whenever I needed.

Select Server Size In Cloudways

Select Your Server Location

I chose the nearest location of my data center for perfect latency.

Select Your Server Location in Cloudways

Next, wait a few minutes till your server is ready!

Access Your WordPress

After the server was finished with the launching process, I went to the Application > Application Management tab. Here, I found the login details of my newly installed WordPress server.

Access Your WordPress in Cloudways

Installing Smart Slider 3 Plugin

Now for the installation of Smart Slider 3 plugin. Here’s what I did. I went to the Dashboard and then navigated to Plugins > Add New, searched for Smart Slider 3, installed it and then activated it.

install Smart Slider 3

After that, I saw the Smart Slider option appear on the WordPress admin sidebar. I clicked on the Smart Slider tab and was taken into the Dashboard of this plugin.

smart slider 3 dashboard

Creating a Slider

To create a slider, I clicked on “New Slider,” after that, a pop-up appeared where I could add slider name, width, height, and preset. I could also import sample sliders as well. After configuring all the settings I wanted, I clicked on the “Create” button.

Create Slider

The slider was created successfully. The next step was adding more slides.

Adding Slides

On the slider page, I added three slides. But you can add more than three slides, if you want.

Add Slide

Slider Options

In this section, I saw two sections. The first section allows changing General Settings, Size, Slider Autoplay, Optimize, Loading, and Developer Settings.

Slider settings

The second section allows controlling the UI settings like Arrow, Bullets, Autoplay, Text Bar, Thumbnail, and Shadows.

Slider controls

You can also add some additional settings by going to the Setting tab that appears on the Dashboard top bar.

Publishing Slider

Now that my image slider is ready, I wanted to publish that on a post, so I went to the post (where I wanted to add the slider), then I inserted the Smart Slider 3’s Gutenberg block, and selected the previously created slider.

Smart Slider 3 block in Gutenberg
Smart Slider 3 block in Gutenberg

You can also add this slider anywhere you want including widgets, pages, etc by using a shortcode, and Smart Slider 3 has integration with the popular page builders, too.

Final Words

Adding a slider for my WordPress website was a great choice and a very easy experience. As demonstrated, you saw that I successfully added a slider to my demo website and it looks great!

If you haven’t tried the Smart Slider plugin, I would recommend you to use Smart Slider for your WordPress website. If you need any help, feel free to ask me via the comments section below.

Saud Razzak

About Author

Saud Razzak is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways – A Managed WordPress Hosting Platform. Saud is responsible for creating buzz, spread knowledge, and educate the people about WordPress in the Community around the globe. In his free time, he likes to play cricket and learn new things on the Internet. You can email him at m.saud@cloudways.com